Empires Apart (60 page)

US corporations were driven on to the world stage not just by their lust for scale and the impersonal forces of global economics but also by the spirit that had pushed earlier generations to settle beyond America's frontiers in Florida, Texas or California. In expanding abroad American business embodied the aspirations of the American people. Corporations did not need to manipulate US government policy to suit their own
ends – it was simply accepted that overseas, as well as at home, what was good for General Motors was good for America. Nowhere was this clearer than in the nexus between the giant oil companies and the guardians of American foreign policy. Charles Hughes, the US secretary of state from 1921 to 1925, was known as the secretary for oil. The state department threatened to prohibit foreign companies from owning oil assets in the US or to designate the existing British- and Dutch-owned oilfields as ‘naval reserves', thus stopping their exploitation. Britain reluctantly granted oil concessions it controlled in Iraq to Standard Oil of New Jersey and Standard Oil of New York, and the Netherlands granted concessions in the Dutch East Indies to Standard Oil of New Jersey. The United States supported a particularly vicious dictator in Venezuela, then the world's largest oil exporter, in return for his barring British access to Venezuelan oil. American oil corporations led by Gulf Oil, owned by the family of Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, negotiated hugely favourable deals with the rulers of Kuwait, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia with the encouragement of the state department. (As an odd footnote, the man who was instrumental in ensuring that American rather than British oil companies won the oil rights in Saudi Arabia was an upper-class but fiercely anti-establishment British expatriate named Philby, whose son would provide even greater services to the Russian empire as a KGB spy.)

Closer to home the changing nature of the US empire could be seen most clearly in the Dominican Republic, which, with Haiti, occupies Columbus's island of Hispaniola. Agriculturally the country was one of the best endowed in the Caribbean. It had been a prime target for the filibusters before the civil war, and just after that war a proposal to annexe it had been narrowly defeated. Instead the United States relied on its economic muscle, and only intervened directly when the local oligarchy seemed to be losing control or failing to act in America's best interests. The US dollar was adopted as the standard of value in 1897, and towards the end of the nineteenth century an American company was responsible for collecting customs duties and taxes (although in 1899 the company was thrown out when it defaulted on its interest obligations). Military
occupations in 1903–05, 1916–24 and 1965–66 were supplemented from 1905 to 1941 by a period as a US protectorate, an arrangement ‘negotiated' by Theodore Roosevelt that gave the US control over such key financial levers as the level of foreign debt and the collection of customs duties. In this way the US was able to control events without needing to invest directly in transport infrastructure, education and health services on the Hawaiian model; more importantly such indirect imperial control avoided the necessity to grant the local population the rights expected by US citizens, such as the right to be represented in the imperial governmental institutions in Washington.

This new model imperialism chimed well with the evolving ideology of democracy. Where ‘spreading democracy' had once meant annexing territory to allow America itself to spread, it now meant ensuring that other nations played by the democratic rules that would allow American corporations to spread. America's existing colonies became an increasing anachronism, and in 1934 the US Congress in the Tydings-McDuffie Act committed itself to granting independence to its largest colony, the Philippines, in ten years' time (a commitment made impossible by the Second World War but honoured in 1946).

Between the two world wars Russia was unable to expand its empire and America had no need to. Territorial aggrandisement in the United States had been driven by the desire for land to settle and resources to exploit, primarily gold. As America became less tolerant of immigrants the need for new land disappeared, and as the country became self-sufficient in nearly everything there was less pressure to seize the resources of others. In Russia territorial aggrandisement was militarily impossible, but Russia was able to grow in a more traditional manner, a manner that had largely disappeared in America with the taming of the western frontier.

It is easy to forget that at the beginning of the twentieth century one of the world's last great unexplored habitable regions was not in the jungles of central Africa or the Amazon rainforests or the wilds of Borneo but in Europe. What is now the Komi Republic was until the 1920s a vast, frozen and virtually unknown wilderness stretching across the top
of European Russia. Its exploration and exploitation are almost entirely thanks to one man, Joseph Stalin, and were accomplished almost entirely with the methods of a man that Stalin consciously emulated, Peter the Great. In 1722 Peter the Great exiled prisoners and their families to the silver mines of Dauriya in eastern Siberia. Stalin did the same sort of thing on a massive scale. Thousands, later hundreds of thousands, of prisoners slaved and died to open up Komi. A typical example of the early exploration was the founding of the city of Vorkuta. The twenty-three men who set off by boat from the prison camp at Ukhta in 1931 could not have been more different from the pioneers in America. Led by secret policemen, most of the party were prisoners, and included geologists specially arrested for their expertise. After paddling through mosquito-infested swamps for hundreds of miles they managed to build a camp and survive through the Arctic winter. In spring they started digging for coal with shovels and picks. Just seven years later 15,000 prisoners were employed in a chain of mines that spread out from the new city of Vorkuta.

As an aside, the sheer scale of unexplored Russia was demonstrated when, as the western world rocked to the Beatles and Rolling Stones, the crew of a KGB helicopter stumbled across a community that could not have been more divorced from the cultural currents of both west and east. Flying over virgin forests in the Urals they were shocked to see signs of human habitation; by chance they had discovered a group of religious dissidents, Old Believers, trying to escape the atheistic tentacles of the Soviet regime. What was amazing was that the community had fled to their forest refuge in 1919 and for half a century had succeeded in remaining undiscovered by one of the world's most omnipotent police states. (The KGB, of course, was not impressed by this feat, and the group's leaders soon found themselves isolated again, this time in the punishment cells of the Potma camp for political prisoners.)

Pushing into uncharted wilderness and pushing into the well-charted territory of others were two sides of the same coin, capturing the same heady mixture of adventure, patriotism and greed.

After the Second World War conditions changed: Russia found itself with sufficient military strength to expand beyond its frontiers once again and America discovered it needed resources from overseas, and once more started to flex its military muscles, but in historical terms the first half of the twentieth century was a period of consolidation and transition for both the Russian and American empires. The Bolsheviks consolidated themselves in power and the world came to terms with an empire moving from an autocracy predicated on the divine right to rule of the Romanov dynasty to one based on the quasi-divine right to rule of the Communist party. In America corporations consolidated their position at the heart of American society, and the imperialism of the Spanish-American War moved to something very different, something that in some ways was not imperialism at all.

The debate about the existence or otherwise of ‘corporate imperialism' is essentially a debate about definitions: the growth and influence of American corporations is a fact, but whether it constitutes imperialism is a matter for debate. Another feature that some claim to see in twentieth-century American imperialism is far more controversial because there is no agreement on the underlying facts. It is something that strikes to the very soul of American society, a characteristic that was certainly present before the twentieth century but many would argue has since disappeared: racism. The lines between racism, racial pride and patriotic fervour are blurred and move over time. What was taken for granted in one century may seem totally abhorrent in another. Men whose views would today be described as racist gave their lives to end slavery. Apartheid in America reached its height at the very moment that black and white Americans were together dying for their country in the trenches of Flanders. It is easy to assume that values we treasure like democracy and liberty remain unchanging through the centuries; that the ideology of democracy that Thomas Paine proclaimed is what we believe today. But the reality is that values change dramatically. Until the middle of the nineteenth century there were many church leaders who endorsed slavery and serfdom; today such convictions have simply vanished.

Another belief once widely held that has also disappeared or at least become invisible is the doctrine of eugenics. Named after the Greek for good breeding, this is the belief that the quality of individuals is determined by their genes, and the quality of society by its gene pool. Now considered a Nazi aberration, eugenics was once widely supported. The First International Eugenics Congress in London in 1912 was attended by leading political figures, such as Winston Churchill, and such distinguished scientists as Alexander Graham Bell. Bell presided over the Second Congress, hosted by the American Museum of Natural History in New York in 1921, which again was supported by leading politicians, for example future president Herbert Hoover. The congresses heard learned papers on such themes as the dangerous consequences for Sweden of allowing interbreeding with Finns, and political diatribes on the ‘rising tide of color' in America. The ideology of compulsory genetic improvement was certainly not restricted to Germany. The Russian Eugenics Society proposed that the communist state's first five year plan should include the artificial insemination of suitable women with the sperm of suitable men to improve the genetic quality of the Soviet population. It was widely believed that supermen and super-races could be created by proper breeding. After Lenin's death his brain was rushed to the Moscow Institute of Brain Research to see what could be learnt that might help to make others in his image.

The pseudo-science of eugenics was started in Britain, but its most active non-Nazi proponents were in America. The forced sterilisation of ‘undesirables' in the US was far from being a central feature of American life but it happened; at least 20,000 were forcibly sterilised in California alone between the early 1900s and late 1960s. The programme was supported by campaigning groups like the Human Betterment Foundation, sanctioned by the Supreme Court and, it is claimed, providing a blueprint for Adolf Hitler's Third Reich, which borrowed heavily from American laws when introducing forced sterilisation for its own ‘undesirables'. A typical advocate of ethnic cleansing was Charles Goethe, founder of the Eugenics Society of Northern California, who proclaimed in 1929 that
the Mexican was ‘eugenically as low-powered as the Negro. He not only does not understand health rules: being a superstitious savage, he resists them.'Today Goethe has a public park named after him in Sacramento, California's capital.

Eugenics was the polite face of racism; underneath it was a far more virulent strain. In 2005 the US Senate passed a motion apologising to 4,743 people lynched between 1882 and 1968. Specifically it was apologising that Congress had three times thrown out a bill, first introduced in 1900, that would have made lynching a federal offence. Most states refused to prosecute whites for lynching blacks, and by refusing to intervene Congress had effectively sanctioned the practice. Not all the victims were black. Immigrants were also targeted, and a century before the Senate apology the US government had paid nearly $500,000 as compensation for the lynching of their citizens to the governments of Italy, Mexico and China. Lynchings are often portrayed as small-scale aberrations carried out by a handful of drunken white males in the middle of the night. In fact, as two researchers put it, ‘Mob killings were often carnival-like events. Refreshments were sold, trains made special trips to lynching sites, schools and businesses closed to let people attend. Newspapers ran adverts for them. Corpses were displayed for days. Victims' ears, fingers and toes became souvenirs.' Some victims had their eyes gouged out or their teeth pulled with pliers; others were beaten, burned at the stake, dismembered or castrated.

The Senate acted after the publication of a book of souvenir postcards depicting photos of lynchings – a typical example, showing the burnt corpse of the victim of a 1915 Texan lynching, is inscribed on the back, ‘This is the barbecue we had last night … Your son Joe.'The senators who in 2005 found such barbarism appalling would probably have denied that there were any real parallels between events in America and the Holocaust in Europe, but racism and anti-semitism were not restricted to Russia and Nazi Germany. American campaigns against ‘communists' often highlighted their genuine or imagined Jewish backgrounds, and Henry Ford used the media interests he controlled to whip up anti-Jewish
sentiment. Ford, the archetypal corporate magnate of the 1920s, wrote, or had written for him, a book entitled
The International Jew
, which blamed the First World War and nearly everything else on the Jewish race. When Jews escaping Germany after the horror of Kristallnacht tried to settle in Haiti, the United States government used its quasi-imperial authority to ‘persuade' the Haitian regime to stop them doing so.

If Trotsky could see hope for his cause in America so too could his most rabid right-wing opponents see hope for theirs. What Trotsky and Ford both misjudged was the degree to which the ideology of democracy was ingrained in the American soul. Demagogues might come to power in Europe, but in America the power of democracy would, it seemed, inevitably triumph – especially as the presidential aspirations of America's very own demagogue were ended in September 1935 by an assassin's bullet.